ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the clinical characteristics of Transcortical Sensory Aphasia (TCSA). It discusses the neural substrate of TCSA and describes the association of the syndrome with focal brain lesions. Patients with TCSA featuring semantic jargon productions often appear anosognosic for the inadequacy of their discourse and they may also be unaware of their logorrhea, in particular when the auditory comprehension deficit is severe. Anomia during spontaneous speech in TCSA may be punctuated by the occasional occurrence of semantic paraphasias. This results because word-finding difficulties and anomia in TCSA regularly arise at the semantic level. The fact that patients with TCSA had deficits involving both comprehension and production has been taken as evidence of degraded information for that item in the semantic store. By contrast, cases of TCSA with lexical-semantic comprehension deficits due to “access” disorders may exhibit dissociation in performance between production and comprehension.
